This is a guest post by Jordan Mallon and is the fifth in our series on “Evangelicals and Evolution: A Student Perspective”. Jordan is a Ph.D. student at the University of Calgary where he is studying the evolutionary palaeoecology of the Late Cretaceous herbivorous dinosaurs from Alberta.
The transition from young earth creationism to a position that reconciles evolution and faith doesn’t occur abruptly. It’s a process that takes time and usually proceeds by the gradual piecing together of concepts and information. This was certainly the case for me. When I was growing up, I sympathized with young earth creationism as taught by the conservative Lutheran church I attended. Now I research and teach evolutionary science at the university level, but only after a prolonged period of soul-searching and careful study during my post-secondary education. My theology of nature is still incomplete, but the clarifying concepts introduced below helped to deconstruct the barriers that often polarize the evolution-creation ‘debate’ and allowed me to gradually formulate what I consider a more integrated view of science and faith. Hopefully, these concepts will help other students in their struggle to harmonize evolution and evangelical Christianity.
1) Agency and Mechanism in Creation
The word ‘creationism’ is understood by many evangelical Christians to refer to the miraculous and instantaneous creation of life by God. This view is prevalent and has pigeonholed many of us into confusing agency for mechanism. That is, the act of creating becomes needlessly associated with divine intervention. The corollary is that any explanation for life’s diversity that doesn’t appeal to miracles, such as evolution, is assumed to somehow exclude God’s creative agency. Evolution is often described by believers and non-believers alike as ‘godless’.
This conflation is unfortunate because the Bible teaches that even natural processes, such as weather, are under God’s control (e.g., Lev 26:4; Deut 11:14; 1 Sam 12:18; Job 5:10, 37:6; Ps 135:7, 147:8). More to the point, we are each called a creation of God (Ps 139:14) despite the fact that human conception and development proceeds by entirely natural processes. The Bible’s distinction between agency and mechanism therefore allows God to exercise His creativity using the laws of nature He instilled at the beginning of creation. In this sense, creationism doesn’t preclude evolution at all! I liken evolution to the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence, in which God is “in, with, and under” the natural processes that produce biodiversity on Earth.
2) Methodological and Ontological Naturalism
If evolution were truly godless because it does not invoke divine intervention, then the same argument would necessarily apply to all of science because the scientific method excludes all appeals to the supernatural. Miracles, by definition, can’t be measured or explained and therefore they do not further our knowledge about how the universe works. Sir Isaac Newton once believed that the stability of our solar system was due to the miraculous intervention of God, but the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace later showed that the stability could be explained entirely through the natural laws of gravity.
It’s important to note, however, that the preclusion of miracles from science is only done in practice. Science cannot comment on whether or not miracles happen, or whether or not God exists; science is neutral on these matters. God may perform miracles every day, but for the reasons given above, the scientific method simply can’t detect them. The search for natural processes that operate in the universe is called methodological naturalism. The atheistic belief that there’s no God and that the natural world is all that exists is called ontological naturalism. The former is perfectly in line with Christian principles, but the latter, obviously, is not.
3) Accommodation and Concordism
If there’s nothing inherently atheistic about the scientific theory of evolution, why do so many evangelicals oppose it so strongly? The answer in large part has to do with the assumptions we bring to the scriptures. Evangelicalism, under the influence of fundamentalism, has promoted the idea that in order to take the Bible seriously, we must believe that it provides a literal and accurate description of the physical universe. That is, God revealed to the authors of Scripture scientific facts about the universe that could not otherwise have been known to them at the time. This assumption is known as scientific concordism. A concordist interpretation of the Genesis creation accounts obviously does not leave room for evolution.
In spite of the popularity of concordism as it pertains to Genesis, history shows that it’s a largely unwarranted assumption. At various points in the past, prominent Christian scholars used the Bible to support numerous outdated ideas about science, most notably geocentrism (e.g., Jos 10:12; 1 Sam 2:8; 1 Chr 16:30; Job 38:4; Ps 19:4–6, 24:2, 50:1, 93:1, 96:10, 104:5; Ecc 1:5; Hab 3:11). These ideas have since fallen by the wayside in light of scientific knowledge, and Christians now read these parts of the Bible in a different way. Rather than blindly insisting that our understanding of the physical world must accord with a literal interpretation of these passages, we now appreciate that God sometimes accommodates His message to the limitations of human understanding. The sun may not literally rotate about the earth as the Bible describes, but it certainly appeared that way to the earth-bound Hebrew people of the Old Testament. The principle of accommodation is the understanding that God spoke to the authors of Scripture using language and imagery with which they were familiar. Many Christians now feel that, given the previous shortcomings of concordism, the Genesis creation account might likewise be better understood as an accommodation of God’s timeless message to the culture of the ancient Hebrew people. If that’s indeed the case, then accepting evolution may be no more heretical than accepting that the earth goes around the sun!
Further Reading
The concepts introduced above are obviously interrelated and merit much lengthier discussions than given in this essay, but time and space prevent further elaboration. I’ll offer instead a few relevant resources that helped shape my thoughts here. Stephen Godfrey and Christopher Smith’s co-authored book Paradigms on Pilgrimage dedicate a couple helpful chapters to exploring more fully the concepts of agency and mechanism, and methodological and ontological naturalism. Denis Lamoureux’s books Evolutionary Creation and I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution similarly provide a thorough discussion of the principles of accommodation and concordism. All the various concepts considered here are connected in Keith Miller’s edited volume Perspectives on an Evolving Creation. Steve Martin tells a similar story to mine in a blog post here. Be sure to also see Steve’s selected bibliography for more resources about the relationship between science and faith.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Clarifying Concepts in the Creation-Evolution Dialogue
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28 comments:
Thanks Jordan. My experience is that #3 is the biggest stumbling block ie. until evangelicals can understand that a high view of scripture does not necessarily require a concordist approach, conversations on #1 and #2 are not that productive. But that might be just my limited experience. I think you've had more "front line" experience than I on this. What do you think?
Good job! We're not quite on the same page about concordism, but I think you have done a tremendous job in outlining the important difference between methodological and metaphysical (ontological) naturalism, as well as highlighting the fact that God's control of mechanism is entirely biblical. My slightly differing view (though I love and deeply respect Steve, of course) is that discussions about #1 and #2 are indeed fruitful, providing a bridge between unnecessarily opposing camps in the evangelical world. Thanks for a great contribution.
Thanks for the comments so far, guys.
Steve, I agree that #3 is probably the biggest stumbling block for most Christians. Indeed, it was the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Once I came to appreciate the difference between concordism and accommodationism, everything just sort of clicked. Finally, an honest way of accounting for the scientific shortcomings of the Bible that still maintains a high view of its purpose!
Dr. Embree, could you please kindly and briefly explain how your understanding of accommodationism differs from my own? I've read some of your posts elsewhere, but don't remember coming across that.
By the way, I just want to send out a quick thanks to my friends Frank V. and Denis L. for their editorial comments on my essay, which helped to strengthen my arguments. And to you, too, Steve!
Accommodate. You don't mean "This part of the bible doesn't make sense so let's ignore it" do you? So which parts do we trust to be accurate, Gen 6? Gen 12? Exodus? Kings? Matthew? Acts? This seems like a slippery slope to me.
Hi Marlowe:
Maybe I overstated it a bit (although I did add the qualifier that this was "my experience"). Personally I find the discussions on #1 and #2 much more interesting (and certainly productive and fruitful). I also find that discussions on #1 and #2 with those who conflate agency & mechanism as well as the different types of naturalism don't seem to go anywhere since their minds are made up that "evolution contradicts the bible". ie. Discussions on #1 and #2 become simply theoretical duals rather than real dialogue since #3 is the real showstopper. But maybe your point is that #1 and #2 are "showstoppers" as well and we need to build all three bridges - & not necessarily in sequential order. Is that what you mean?
Jim: Need to run right now, but suffice to say we ECs have good reasons why we believe a) the history of the Gospels is very accurate and b) at the same time that Gen 1-3 or even 1-11 does not accurately reflect history. (Note also that, many ECs disagree on my statement b).
"This seems like a slippery slope to me"
Hi Jim, This is a slippery slope only if you see it like that. I personally see it as being truer to the scripture. You see, you shouldn't see the bible as a whole but instead as a collection of books and each book should be studied/read as a unit. To read Genesis and Psalms for example as if they both are identical would be a major mistake which ignores the nature of either books. The clue for Genesis is in its name, Beresheet in hebrew whcih means beginnings, it's purpose is to show the beginings of the people of israel...
The gospel then are different as they introduce Jesus, and each gospel should be studied independent of each other. This is not a pick and mix approach to the bible but instead a respectful approach to what it is and what is not, (one single book).
Hi Jim: I certainly don't advocate ignoring any part of the Bible, nor do I think recognizing a particular passage as non-historical amounts to as much. A passage can still retain meaning without necessarily being historical. Christ's parables come to mind.
I should also point out that the principle of accommodation is not unique to evolutionary creationism, and so the accusation that it is a slippery slope isn't a problem unique to EC, either. Do you believe the sun really moves about the earth as the Bible says, or do you believe this is an accommodation to the earth-bound perspective of man? If the latter, does it necessarily follow that Christ's resurrection was non-historical, too? I don't think so. Daniel o is right: The meaning of every passage must be discerned from its grammatical and historical context so that no one hermeneutic applies to the Bible as a whole.
Jordan: Wasn't the outcome of your "search" sort of pre-ordained in the sense that had you come to any other conclusion about the nature of the Genesis record it would have been the death knell of your career. Mainstream science does not look kindly on scientists who do not hold to the accepted narrative (witness Michael Behe's experience).
Also, you mention books that helped formulate your position. I assume that you investigated the other side? Behe: "The Edge of Evolution" and "Darwin's Black Box." Philip Johnson: "Darwin on Trial," etc. etc.
Thanks for commenting on my essay, Merf. With regards to your first point, I disagree that "mainstream science does not look kindly on scientists who do not hold to the accepted narrative". As evidenced by previous scientific revolutions (heliocentrism, atomic theory, extinction, etc.), the status quo will change so long as there is evidence to the contrary. If I could show that the scientific evidence really does support a literal, historical Genesis, I have little doubt that scientists would come to accept that. But the fact of the matter is that the evidence supports evolution rather than miraculous creation in six days. There is certainly no conspiracy, if that's what you're implying.
Re: your second question, I have indeed read those works and I reject them on the basis of their poor scholarship. Behe's arguments for irreducible complexity were each refuted by Ken Miller in his book Finding Darwin's God, and Johnson's arguments were refuted by Denis Lamoureux in their co-authored book Darwinism Defeated? I should point out that even if I were to accept their arguments, Behe and (I think) Johnson do not accept the historicity of Genesis 1 and 2.
Jordan, thanks for the exposition. If I am not mistaken, Hugh Ross and the Reasons to Believe folks hold to a concordist thought. I think that is the primary reason that he does not accept evolution. My understanding of concordism has led me to reject it as being an inaccurate view of scripture, perhaps as inacccurate as that espoused by the young earth creation movement. Merf, I have to agree with Jordan about the ID books that you mentioned. Phillip Johnson's book, in particular, does a very poor job of addressing either the fossil record or evolutionary theory. As a matter of fact, that is a peculiar thing about many of the ID researchers: they persistently misunderstand evolution or mischaracterize its arguments.
The "baby with the bathwater" slipper slope argument is a strong one among evangelicals. My wife even adheres to it sometimes in our argu...er, conversations about the subject. Such an argument assumes that the entire Bible is to be read in exactly the same way, however. I do not think that this is either scripturally or scientifically defensible.
Jordan, do you know off top of your head where Philip Johnson denies the historicity of Genesis 1 and 2? I don't remember reading that.
Hi Jim: I don't recall reading Johnson's position on origins elsewhere. He seems more intent on slagging evolution than stating where he stands. I assume he rejects Genesis as historical given his affiliation with Behe and the Discovery Institute, and given the way he distances himself from YECs. I believe he also subscribes to the idea of the Cambrian Explosion, which precludes YECism. I could be wrong, though.
Philip Johnson's book did not set out to address the fossil record (or rather the lack thereof). He probably did not feel the need to do so since Stephen Gould has admitted that primary word to describe the fossil record is stasis.
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:
"Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I only wish to point out that it is never "seen" in the rocks." - Stephen Gould
Evolution happened too fast to be seen in the fossil record, yet too slow to be seen in one person's life. Sounds like the emperor has no clothes to me.
Hi Murf,
Welcome. I suspect that Jordan will have further comment on this (it is his area of interest) but I'm wondering if you've had a chance to review some of the responses to the "no transitional forms" assertion? Two highly readable essays from Evangelical scientists are two sections in Kieth Miller's Perspectives on an Evolving Creation - chapter 7 and 8 directly address your concerns.
Also, you may want to check out the CC200 and CC300 sections of Index of Creationists Claims for some other counter arguments.
Murf, both of your quote-mines are almost 30 years old. Are you interesting in discussing the innumerable transitional fossils that have been discovered since then? Or how even when Gould make those comments he clarified (after being misqouted many times) that the fossil record still had a great many transitional fossils that provide solid evidence for macroevolution?
If you are going to claim that the fossil record yields no transitional fossils then you are either ignorant (and that is no problem as everyone is ignorant about lots of things, and it is something that can be remedied) or you are being deliberately deceitful.
As has been pointed out, Keith Miller's works are very good (even though they themselves are a little out of date too, due to the fact that the number of transitional fossils grows at such a rapid pace);
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Miller.html
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF12-97Miller2.html
For anyone wanting a more complete and up-to-date assessment of the fossil record as modern paleontologists understand it read Donald Prothero's 'Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters'.
Murf, if you say that the trade secret of palaeontology is that there is rarity in transitional forms, you need to back that statement up because I can guaran-DANG-tee you that there are thousands of transitional fossils out there. I can think of dozens of fossils within the human fossil record ALONE that show transitional characters. Geologically, many of these species show up in the blink of an eye but in reality, they appear over the course of thousands of generations. In fact, it was my study of human palaeontology that convinced me BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT that evolution has and is happening.
Even Gould and Eldredge never argued that evolution didn't happen. They argued that it proceeded in fits and spurts followed by periods of stasis. This is exactly what you would expect over the course of the life of a species as the environment changed around it.
Ironically, the punk-eek position was not new with them. The brilliant George Gaylord Simpson showed in the 1940s that evolution in many different forms was not always slow and steady but went through times of rapid change. And, speaking of Gould, if you read a bit more, he says this:
“In my field of evolutionary biology, the most prominent urban legend —another ‘truth’ known by ‘everyone’—holds that evolution may well be the way of the world, but one has to accept the idea with a dose of faith because the process occurs far too slowly to yield any observable result in a human life-time. Thus, we can document evolution from the fossil record and infer the process from the taxonomic relationships of living species, but we cannot see evolution on human timescales ‘in the wild.’ In fairness, we professionals must shoulder some of the blame for this utterly false impression about evolution's invisibility in the here and now of everyday human life. Darwin himself — thought he knew and emphasized many cases of substantial changes in human time (including the development of breeds in his beloved pigeons — tended to wax eloquent about the inexorable and stately slowness of natural evolution. In a famous passage from The Origin of Species, he even devised a striking metaphor about clocks to underscore the usual invisibility:
[Begin Darwin quote] It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, through out the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and invisibly working…We see nothing of theses slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages.[End Darwin quote]
“Nonetheless, the claim that evolution must be too slow to see can only rank as an urban legend — though not a completely harmless tale in this case, for our creationists incubi can then use the fallacy as an argument against evolution at any scale, and many folks take them seriously because they just ‘know’ that evolution can never be seen in the immediate here and now. In fact, a completely opposite situation actually prevails: biologists have documented a veritable glut of cases for rapid and eminently measurable evolution on timescales of years and decades.”
— "The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant," The Lying Stones of Marrakech, New York: Harmony Books, 2000, pp. 334-335.
Sorry for the long quote but it is instructive. Gould gets misquoted a bunch!
Hi Murf (sorry for misspelling your name earlier): In trying to understand Eldredge and Gould's punctuated equilibrium model and what it predicts about the existence of transitional fossils, I think it's first important to understand Darwin's original evolutionary model and what he predicted about transitional fossils.
Picture evolution as the addition of blue paint droplets to a bucket of pure yellow paint. Darwin envisioned evolution as the addition of blue droplets one-by-one, slowly accumulating change and gradually (but constantly) transforming the bucket from yellow to green. If evolution truly occurred in such a fashion, then at no one point would there be either a stasis in colour (or body shape, by analogy) or a sudden shift in colour (or body shape, again). This model predicts a spectrum from yellow to green with all shades (or shapes) in between.
In the face Darwin's prediction, Eldredge and Gould noted that, in fact, stasis is the norm in the fossil record, where one recognizable body shape arises, persists for hundreds of thousands or even a few million years, and is replaced by another, slightly different body shape. Change appears to occur rapidly, indeed, much more rapidly than the fossil record can normally document (this is called the 'epistemological gap'). This isn't to say that there are no transitional fossils, only fewer than what was predicted by Darwin's gradualistic model. Getting back to the paint bucket analogy, the blue paint appears to be added ten drops at a time, rather than one-by-one. And we see this kind of rapid speciation happening in nature today (check out this article just released yesterday: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/speciation-in-action). The reason speciation occurs rapidly is due to what G. G. Simpson called a 'genetic revolution', where a sub-population becomes reproductively isolated (let's say, via geographic isolation) and quickly establishes a new shape of its own, given the reduced gene pool. The point is: the rarity of transitional fossils (relative to Darwin's prediction) is exactly what we should expect to see given what we know about how speciation occurs today. Speciation simply doesn't occur slowly and gradually, as Darwin predicted. It occurs in a geological blink of an eye, and we can see that happening today. Still, fossils with shapes that are transitional between genera, families, orders, and even phyla are recognizable if we broaden our scope.
I should also point out that evolution can be inferred even without the use of fossils. All living species exhibit an array of characteristics that form a nested hierarchy (e.g., all furry animals have four legs, but not all four-legged animals have fur; all four-legged animals have backbones, but not all backboned animals have four legs; all backboned animals have bilateral symmetry, but not all bilaterally symmetrical animals have backbones, etc.). This pattern is predicted only by descent with modification (evolution).
Anyhow, the details of evolution are documented in thousands of textbooks and I'm not here to discuss that. It'd be great if we could get back to the relationship between evolution and evangelical faith.
Jimpithecus,
What transitional fossils are there showing gradual changes from one phylum to another? Or from one class to another?
Why do we not see any ancestors to the Cambrian fossils, but instead find the soft-bodied Ediacara fossils?
Murf, there are more than two dozen different forms of Cretaceous theropods that have evolved feathers, one of which gave rise to modern birds. You have Archaeopteryx, Rahonavis, Iberomesornis, Patagopteryx, the Hesperornithiformes, the Ichthyornithiformes and others.
From reptiles to mammals, you have forms like Dimetrodon in the Late Permian, through the Anomodontia (five known genera), theriodontia (2 known genus), through the Cynodontia (9 known genus) then on to mammals. The changes include reorientation of the limbs as well as changes in the skull.
Recently, there was a discovery of a frogamander which, while not a class level transition, shows the split between salamanders and frogs.
The ape/human split is probably only a bit earlier than Ardipithecus ramidus, which shows tremendous transitional charateristics.
If you need more info, go to some of the sites I recommended earlier on this blog. Here is site that is somewhat dated (1997) but still has good information for the time. Since then hundreds of fossils have been discovered, including many of the feathered dinosaurs.
pds, if it's phylum-level evolution you're interested in, you should check out the following essays by Glenn Morton:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/cambevol.htm
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2001/PSCF3-01Morton.html
... and the following book by invert palaeontologist James Valentine:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=DMBkmHm5fe4C&lpg=PP1&dq=On%20the%20Origin%20of%20Phyla&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Jordan, I recently read what I thought to be a very good paper on the early chapters of Genesis called Understanding the Biblical Creation Passages by Paul Marston. He argues, quite persuasively I think, that neither the YEC reading or the concordist reading of the scripture is warranted. it is a bit lengthy but worth the read.
Thanks, Jimpithecus. I'll be sure to give it a read shortly.
Jordan wrote: "There is certainly no conspiracy, if that's what you're implying."
No, I was not implying a conspiracy, although when it comes to so-called global warming, if these exchange of emails are true, there appears to have been.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked#63657
This is a must read. Thanks.
Hi Jordan,
If Benjamin B. Warfield, one of the greatest adherents of Biblical Infallibility, could accept Darwinian evolution, then I certainly won't raise any Biblical objections to it, either.
However, I will raise objections to your view that science cannot detect the supernatural, or at least design.
I think the best explanation for the origin of life is that it was intelligently designed. This is not just because there is no good non-intelligent theory (and there certainly isn't). It's because we now know enough to say that the workings of even the simplest cell resemble highly advanced nanotechnology. Insisting that it must have come about through some non-intelligent means is mere philosophical obscurantism. The evidence is insufficient to determine whether the designer was God or some natural agent. But the evidence is sufficient to say that the first cells were designed.
In addition, not only Lynn Margulis, but now also Carl Woese, reject the Modern Synthesis as being able to explain the bulk of evolution. They offer naturalistic explanations -- symbiogenesis and horizontal gene transfer. But I think both would accept Behe's criticisms of neo-Darwinism in his books, Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, even though they would reject his solution of intelligent design.
If non-believing scientists of such stature can reject neo-Darwinism, why must you insist that believers accept it?
Hi Murf,
Not sure I agree that those emails show anything close to a conspiracy. But I’m not sure I understand how GW (or lack thereof) has anything to do with the OP or the discussion that follows. Can you explain the connection?
Bilbo: I don’t think any EC would insist that life “must have come about through some non-intelligent means”. In fact, we absolutely insist that life came about through a very specific intelligent being – the God revealed through the written Scriptures and the Word made flesh.
So you, I, and all other Christians (creationists of all stripes) agree that God did it. We also agree that there is currently no good scientific explanation for the first appearance of life. Where you and I probably disagree, is whether science can ever provide an adequate description of HOW God created the initial life forms on earth. I think you are pretty confident that this explanation will never be provided, and in fact that it has been demonstrated that science can NEVER provide this explanation. For me, I’ll simply say “I don’t know” ie. I am pretty skeptical of both the "Life began by mechanism X" and the "No mechanism will ever be found" claims. And theologically I'm not sure I have a whole lot of investment in either camp.
But the salient point here (I think) , aren't you conflating agency with mechanism - ie. Jordan’s point #1?
Steve wrote: "Where you and I probably disagree, is whether science can ever provide an adequate description of HOW God created the initial life forms on earth."
I don't think science can show that God had anythng to do with the creation of the universe or of the initial life forms. But I think science can show that the best explanation is that both were intelligently designed.
"But the salient point here (I think) , aren't you conflating agency with mechanism - ie. Jordan’s point #1?"
No. Jordan's point was that it is not theologically important whether God created life directly or indirectly. I agree. My objections are that Jordan thinks that it is illegitimate for science to conclude that the first life forms were intelligently designed, and that believers should accept neo-Darwinism. -- Bilbo (my password isn't working).
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